That’s a Very Fine How Do You Do

If there’s one thing trainer Ron McAnally knows when he sees one, it’s a great race horse. Lord knows, he has had enough of them--the great John Henry whom he conditioned through his hall-of-fame years; Bayakoa, the great mare; Paseana, all manner of finely tuned runners from claimers to stakes horses.

And he knew right away this kind of puny little colt that got off the van at Hollywood Park one day wasn’t one of them.

McAnally studied the conformation, the stride, the style and he wondered if somebody was putting him on. Horses are supposed to have the look of eagles about them. This one had more the look of a wren.

He was so tinily made that, with a little luck, he could have been a pony. Put stripes on him and he’d pass for a zebra. He made his 100-pound jockey look like John Wayne.

McAnally knew right away he wasn’t looking at Man o’ War. Or Secretariat. The 3-year-old’s name was Hello, and as far as Ron was concerned it could have been Goodbye.

Even his workouts were something less than clock-breaking. Six furlongs in 1:15 and change doesn’t send anyone running to the windows to get down. McAnally didn’t know whether to put him in a race or on a bridle path.

But he did know one thing: The good friend who’d picked Hello out of a crowd in Italy and turned him over to Ron knew horses as well as Geronimo. Murray Friedlander had been around racetracks all his life and he was the Branch Rickey of his business. Rickey, you will remember, was said to have such an eye for baseball talent, he could spot a hall-of-fame prospect from the window of a moving train.

Friedlander persuaded Al and Sandee Kirkwood of Vancouver, Wash., to buy Hello--for a reported $350,000--and bring him to the U.S.

For all his brilliant record, the one race that has eluded McAnally is the Kentucky Derby. He has put seven wannabes in the starting gate there but fourth is the best they could return.

So McAnally didn’t think he had a Triple Crown prospect in this runt from abroad. A horse barely 15 hands and 900 pounds does not usually set the auctioneers to drooling.

But that’s why they have races and not beauty contests. And Hello had run like a little champion in Europe. He had won his last two races there, one of them by 9 1/4 lengths, and he had three wins and two seconds in nine races.

Besides, big only counts in basketball. History shows us that the race is not always to the swift nor the victory to the strong--even though the adage continues that that’s the way to bet. Determine was never a very big horse but he had a big heart. He won the 1954 Kentucky Derby and might have won the Triple Crown that year except he wasn’t entered in those other two races.

War Admiral, the most famous son of Man o’ War, was not a big animal. He won the 1937 Kentucky Derby and almost everything else. Northern Dancer, who won the 1964 Derby and became the top sire in racing, was compact.

Long-legged horses frequently have trouble negotiating turns. They can’t corner like an Indy car. More like a bus.

Hello came to California and promptly won his first race, a flat mile on the grass course at Hollywood Park.

But McAnally knew that, to succeed in the American classic campaign, a horse had to run on dirt. Hello never had. European racing started on the palace lawns and never got far away from them. That’s why it was the sport of kings.

So, when McAnally put Hello in the Santa Catalina Stakes at a mile and a sixteenth last Sunday at Santa Anita, a lot of fingers were crossed.

The Santa Catalina is one of the steppingstones to the Kentucky Derby--and the Santa Anita Derby--and the elite 3-year-olds of the track were in the field, notably Boston Harbor, who won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile last year.

The crowd wasn’t impressed. The little immigrant--Hello was born and bred in Ireland and was kind of the green-card representative in this field--looked like a refugee from a merry-go-round out there.

His colors, red and green, should have been all green. It was the Irish connection: Horse, trainer and rider, Cris McCarron, are all of Irish extraction.

The crowd bet him down to a modest 6 to 1. (Boston Harbor was odds-on--9 to 10.)

But Hello didn’t seem to know he was little. McCarron ran him confidently, settling him well off the pace till the field turned for home. Then Hello became goodbye, easily sweeping past the leaders and winning by a length and three-quarters.

The win may not make him the winter-book favorite for the Derby. And he may lose that classic to some 17-hand troglodyte of the track.

But the Santa Catalina was the race in which the lordly Ferdinand, who went on to win the Kentucky Derby and run second in the Preakness and third in the Belmont, first served notice he was to be reckoned with. Apparently, not many were paying attention, for he paid $37.40 at the Derby.

Still, McAnally’s little guy should show the sports world once again that bigness is nice but not necessary. After all, Michael Jordan is not 7 feet tall, although some of the guys he dunks over are. One of baseball’s great players was named Pee Wee (Reese) and the Super Bowl was won this year by Desmond Howard, who could wear a top hat in a Volkswagen.

But the all-time moral lesson is that of the French soldier who pointed over at the little recruit and said, “How in the world did he get in our army?” to which the non-com said, “I dunno. His name is Napoleon something-or-other.”

McAnally is not worried about his little corporal either.

“There’s just enough room for his heart,” he boasts.

He’ll downsize the field at Louisville.